


I stand before you in cinders

by scarecrowes



Category: Boardwalk Empire
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-15
Updated: 2012-09-15
Packaged: 2017-11-14 06:12:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/512171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarecrowes/pseuds/scarecrowes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“And if we live, we live to tread on kings;<br/>If die, brave death, when princes die with us.”  - Henry IV, Act V, Scene ii</p>
            </blockquote>





	I stand before you in cinders

**Author's Note:**

> Charlie, Jimmy, a second-person fic about parallels and might have beens.

It didn’t have to be this way.

There were many different roads you could have taken - so like a cliché, but maybe it wouldn’t have all led to blood on your wallpaper, or staring dead-eyed at animals, cleaned and stuffed, that you didn’t kill with your own hands.

It didn’t have to be this way.

You could have struck a deal. You could have  _told_ him. Or you could have pushed Meyer further away instead of caving when both of you had blood in your teeth and throats raw from screaming. After all, you don’t  _need_ him.

Maybe it would have worked if you believed that.

Maybe it would have worked if you listened, when they told you -  _pay him._ A couple dollars from your pocket and everyone could be happy, if you just could have pretended that it didn’t remind you of Nucky handing you a billfold, throwing money at the problems just to grease the wheels.

Or if you’d come at it differently, like maybe Jimmy could trust you, or if you’d stood your ground against AR’s quiet smile and advice because Jimmy didn’t want to get over anything so  _why should you?_

It could have been something else entirely.

It could have been the two of you on a New York sidewalk because you’d never leave your home and he doesn’t want anything more to do with his. Maybe you’d have been there when Joe’s boys came around, to lock eyes over a card table and not let Jimmy leave without knowing Meyer doesn’t need his  _help._

And you, with your son and your wife with her new ring and her newly cropped hair might be  _happy,_ even if there’s an unfamiliar face that comes around so often to fill Angela with vicious ideas. You’d still promise her that things would get better.

There’s another place, maybe, where one of you is a little more patient and a little more careful, where your loyalty doesn’t even let you dare turn your back to the man who pulled you off the street and gave you  _chances._

And there’s another place, too, where the same one of you has a smaller, blacker heart, and you can level a gun that’s really loaded to his head, and even Meyer doesn’t matter as much as the money does.

There’s a different world where one of you is listened to, and it might be Nucky or Angela, but there’s something pulled from your chest all the same before it poisons you. Maybe you stayed in school. Maybe you didn’t. Maybe you died in the war and came back a song-filled hero and a young fool.

But it goes like this.

You listen to the wrong voices, the ones that aren’t yours. It means sending a man to kill your father, or pushing your own unloaded gun into his back, and something in you swells like the torrent of a flood. You think, or know, he’ll hate you - and you try to make yourself small and angry and  _cold._

One of you sits in the dark of a house that was never yours - numb, like there’s ice in your veins and not everything from the belly of a needle. Like the weight you’ve shouldered will make you crack open wide before it breaks you. You promised her the world, and that’s all you remember, after Richard shuts curtains and leaves you  _alone._

One of you sits by a window on Park Avenue - full of smoke and your ashtray overflowing, the bruises from three different lovers in your skin and even that doesn’t ease how much you’re  _burning._ The split of the liquor you can’t push will change soon, more taken for yourselves, and you can pretend that the greater profits might help you forget the solid weight of betrayal. How much you wear luck as a name but still feel like a prince too soon asking to be called  _king._

In another world unshaped by business deals and the blood you failed to spill, you might have been friends.

Or you might have never met - except through bullet holes, if you could be cold enough to never grin and call a man  _father._

Neither of you has ever believed in fate.


End file.
